This is a space for my own, personal musings. Possibly I shall, at a later date, connect this to my company's website (http://www.disabilitysolutions.co.za) & "official" blog(http://disabilitysolutions@blogspot.com). But for now, it remains my own private observations, distinct from Disability Solutions.

Sunday, 8 April 2007

This is so funny! I use Wikipedia a lot, and find it a very useful resource. On one level, I think it is hilarious that the American religious right wing feels so threatened by "non American" spelling of words... That would be the correct way then?? (Try being a "real" English user, and the battles we have with the stupid spell checkers with Microsoft...yes, I know we can change to English (UK), but it keeps changing back to English (US)). But on another level, I do find this quite disturbing; if they are so insecure, and bigoted then we should only expect more trouble from them. This is designed to be a project for home-schooled children, and they hope it will become the "largest & most reliable" online educational resource of its kind...I sincerely hope not, and I hope enough people see this silly, zenophobic, racist project for what it really represents.

Rather than having anything as mundane as posting rules, Conservapedia has Commandments. The first Commandment is ' Everything you post must be true and verifiable.' Strange that, I always thought it was 'Thou shalt have no other gods before me.' But Conservapedia is 'the encyclopedia you can trust' – apart from knowing how to spell 'encyclopaedia', obviously – so I must be mistaken. Oooh, hang on, Commandment Five says that American spelling of words must be used. And as everyone knows, both Jesus and his dad were born in the USA.

Coming back to Conservapedia's First Commandment, it will be interesting to see exactly how any reference to the Bible will be verified as fact. Obviously, as a new site, many subjects have yet to appear, or are in need of expansion. This is the full article on Iraq, for example:

A Middle-Eastern country, currently occupied by U.S. Troops.

We feel sure that all God-fearing INQUIRER readers will step up to the plate and fill in a few of these gaps for them. If you don't, the turrists will have won"